PICTURES OF 3 SEASONS

After A Winter Warm Spell
After Her Divorce
After The Bars Close
Alice's Romance
April
August
The Bond
Buck Fever
Cold Snap
Corline Man
Crossing The River
Custom Denied
Dream
Engligh Teacher
Fall Plowing
Father Of Many
Finnish Women In The Summer Kitchen
Fossum
Going Back To The Bar
His Mother
Hot Night
Hunter In Winter
Ida Marie
In A Dim Nest
In The Pasture Near Locherbie
Incantation Against Suicide
Instructions For Secession
It Starts Somewhere
The Junkman
Keys
The Last Child Goes
Learning To See Again-after A Decision To Quit Writing
Loner
The Man In 103
Melvin Quits Farming
A Modern Judgment: On Seeing Bruegel's The Triumph Of Death
No One Talks About This
Of All The Dust
Old Men Who Stand On The Streetcorners
The One That Fought Back
Pictures Of Three Seasons
Prairie July
Prodigal At The Deathbed
R
The Reading
Right About Now
So You Want To Know About Coon Hunting
Some Weather Turns
Spring; Letting The Cows Out
Sucker Spearing
Sudden Calm
Testing Distances
Three Day Blizzard
The Town Fool
The Warranty
Young Pigs On Adventure
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

One gets the sense when reading Pictures of Tbree Seasons that Gail Rixon has looked so intently at the world around her and has felt her own history within it so keenly that in her poetry she becomes the medium through which the meaning of the most primal things is revealed in small pieces. She creates the land in her poems as surely as the land has created her and then draws forth people that seem to rise up out of the landscape she has painted. They are as much a part of the land as Rixon herself and they are as real. These poems are unflinchingly about death and the loss of things parents, hope, life, seasons, love but since they are so firmly rooted in the land and the seasons, they also become poems that redeem that loss. In the title poem for her book, Rixon seems to outline her motive for poetry: "Somebow the pictures do not show what I saw. Sometbing about the lack of light or slow film or the distance." The whole volume seems to grow out of the will to give the reader what photographs can't, to inject life into the mere picture of things, to invest the landscape with energy, and to connect to the ongoing rhythms of the seasons that encompass both change and renewal. She succeeds. -- From Independent Publisher